July 27, 2004
Poetic Consistency
Ron Silliman makes a point that the "well-formed book of poems [displays a] self-similarity [in] its contents", I'm just not sure what that point is. The observation itself is fairly obvious once you think about it, so I doubt that's his entire point. He's setting up a rewiew of a Charles Bernstein's "The Sophist", so that's one reason for the post, but it seems that he's also criticizing this "self-similarity" as well. While I can understand attacking books that "appeared to have come all from the same cookie-cutter," stylistic and thematic consistency within a book also serves an important, if obvious, purpose. Take, for example, Louise Glück's Pulitzer Prize winning The Wild Iris, a book-length sequence of poems grounded in the metaphors of flowers. From what I remember, the book is laid out in a formal sequence that further ties all the poems together. However, rather than a cookie-cutter feel, the similarity of the poems combine with the book's structure to create a richer meditation and heavier symbols. It's as if she's created, instead of a book of related poems, a book-length poem broken into self-supporting sections. That is the real benefit of the consistency among poems; they strengthen and enhance one another. The challenge, then, is to create this positive feedback while varying the individual poems enough to prevent boredom due to too much similarity among the works or, even, across books. This seems to be the failure Silliman is actually criticizing and, again, is rather uncontroversial and mundane. Unfortunately, as I wrote earlier, we seem to be mired in a slow news cycle, so I thought I'd toss this off as part of my insidious attempt to morph this into a literary blog. As you can see, I'm really struggling today.